Words Are My Matter

As I write my lines of words, I may try to express things I think are true and important. That’s what I’m doing right now in writing this essay. expression is not revelation, and this essay, though there’s art in the writing of it, is less a work of art than a message. But Art reveals something beyond the message. A story or poem may reveal truths to me as I write it. I don’t put them there. I find them in the story as I work. And other readers may find other truths in it, different ones. They’re free to use the work in ways the author never intended. Think of how we read Sophocles or Euripides. For three thousand years, we’ve been reading the Greek tragedies, putting our souls into them and discovering in them lessons in human passion, pleas for justice, inexhaustible meanings far beyond what the author’s conscious intention of religious or moral teaching, of warning or solace or community celebration, could ever provide. Those works were written out of that mystery, the deep the wellspring of art.

works much better than overt moralising does. It is more effective. But there’s a moral reason too. What my is what she needs, and she knows her needs better than I do. My only wisdom is knowing how to make pots. Who am I to preach? No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression. my pot “The great Way is very simple; merely forgo opinion,” says the Taoist, and I know it’s true-but there’s a preacher in me who just longs to cram my lovely pot with my opinions, my beliefs, with Truths. And if my subject’s a morally loaded one, such as Man’s relationship to Naturewell, that Inner Preacher’s just itching to set people straight and tell them how to think and what to do, yes, Lord, amen! I have more trust in my Inner Teacher. She is subtle and humble because she hopes to be understood. She contains contradictory opinions without getting indigestion. She can mediate between the arrogant artist self who mutters, “I don’t give a damn if you don’t understand me,” and the preacher self who shouts, “Now hear this!” She doesn’t declare truth, but offers

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then, the stupidity of the contemporary corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them-or occasionally, for the top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit. And not only profit, but growth. If there are stockholders, their holdings must increase yearly, daily, hourly. The AP article ascribed “listless” or “flat” book sales to the limited opportunity for expansion. But until the corporate takeovers, publishers did not expect expansion; they were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, “flatly.” How can you make book sales endlessly, like the American waistline? corn. When you’ve grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore’s Dilemma how you do it with you create unreasonable demands-artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them And you use the fats and sweets of corn by-products to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the And process. you can’t stop these processes, because if you did profits might become “listless,” even “flat”

And the internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from web surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet. 71

Besides, readers aren’t viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different TV goes on, and on, and on, and all from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the on button, the have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness-not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it-everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

Fiction is invention, but it is not lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either factfinding or lying. I want to talk here about the difference between imagination and wishful thinking, because it’s important both in writing and in living Wishful thinking is thinking cut loose from reality, a self-indulgence that even in its is often merely childish, but may be dangerous. Imagination, wildest flights, is not detached from reality: imagination acknowledges reality, starts from it, and returns to it to enrich it.

In workshops on story writing, I’ve met many writers who want to work only with memoir, tell only their own story, their experience. Often they say, “I can’t make up stuff, that’s too hard, but I can tell what happened.” It seems easier to them to take material directly from their experience than to use their experience as material for making up a story. They assume that they can just write what happened. That appears reasonable, but actually, reproducing experience is a very tricky business requiring both artfulness and practice. You may find you don’t know certain important facts or elements of the story you want to tell. Or the private experience so important to you may not be very interesting to others, requires skill to make it meaningful, moving, to the reader. Or, being about yourself, it gets all tangled up with ego, or begins to be falsified by wishful thinking. If you’re honestly trying to tell what happened, you find facts are very obstinate things to deal with. But if you begin to fake them, to pretend things happened in a way that makes a nice neat story, you’re misusing imagination. You’re passing invention off as fact: which is, among children at least, called lying. Fiction is invention, but it is not lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either fact-finding or lying

For most of human history, most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time-these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the (male) ruling class

The loyal fans bought Death at One O’Clock . yet all of a sudden they won’t buy Death at and Death at Two O’Clock… as Eleven O’Clock even though it follows exactly the same surefire formula all the others. The readers got bored. What is a good growth-capitalist publisher to do? Where can he be safe? He can find some safety in exploiting the social function of literature.

A story that’s mere wish-fulfilling babble, or coercive preaching concealed in a narrative, lacks intellectual coherence and integrity: it isn’t a whole thing, it can’t stand up, it isn’t true to itself. Learning to read or tell a story that is true to itself is about the best education a mind can have

From compost, whole gardens grow. It can be useful to think of writing as gardening. You plant the seeds, but each plant will take its own way and shape. The gardener’s in control, yes; but plants are living, willful things. Every story has to find its own way to the light. Your great tool as gardener is your imagination. Young writers often think-are taught to think-that a story starts with a message. That is not my experience. What’s important when you start is simply this: you have a story you want to tell. A seedling that wants to grow. Something in your inner experience is forcing itself up towards the light. Attentively and carefully and patiently, you can encourage let it happen. Don’t force it; trust it. Watch it, water it, let it grow. that, As you write a story, if you can let it become itself, tell itself fully and truly, you may discover what it’s really about, what it says, why you wanted to tell it. It may be a surprise to you. You may have thought you planted a dahlia, and look what came up, an eggplant! Fiction is not information transmission; it is not message-sending. The writing of fiction is endlessly surprising to the writer

. Growth capitalism is by nature inimical to the craftsman and the artist. Copyright was a kind of loophole that allowed us to live within capitalism, but by using reactionary elements in the government, the corporations are actively seeking ways to wreck copyright, exploit us, and control what we write